Ask A VC: Javelin Venture Partners' Noah Doyle On The Next Innovations In Mapping And More

In this week's Ask A VC show, Javelin Venture Partners' Managing Director Noah Doyle sat down to talk with us about why he started a venture firm, where the next innovations in mapping are coming from and more. Doyle has extensive experience in the online mapping world?he directed the enterprise product line for Google's geospatial products, including Google Earth and Google Maps. Prior to Google, Noah managed the Marketing Strategy and Corporate Development functions at Keyhole, a company that created the first Web-hosted digital earth model and was acquired by Google in 2004. Doyle explains to us that some of the new technologies he's excited about include layering social data across maps.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5RsKp3v-_RY/

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France's top rabbi takes leave amid scandal

FILE - In this July 12, 2012 file photo, France's Grand Rabbi Gilles Bernheim talks to the media after his meeting with French President Francois Hollande at the Elysee Palace in Paris. French Jewish leaders were holding an urgent meeting to discuss the career fate of France?s chief rabbi Bernheim after he acknowledged ?mistakes? amid allegations that he plagiarized texts and lied about his educational background.(AP Photo/Francois Mori, File)

FILE - In this July 12, 2012 file photo, France's Grand Rabbi Gilles Bernheim talks to the media after his meeting with French President Francois Hollande at the Elysee Palace in Paris. French Jewish leaders were holding an urgent meeting to discuss the career fate of France?s chief rabbi Bernheim after he acknowledged ?mistakes? amid allegations that he plagiarized texts and lied about his educational background.(AP Photo/Francois Mori, File)

FILE - In this July 12, 2012 file photo, France's Grand Rabbi Gilles Bernheim, left, talks to the media after his meeting with French President Francois Hollande at the Elysee Palace in Paris. French Jewish leaders were holding an urgent meeting to discuss the career fate of France?s chief rabbi after he acknowledged ?mistakes? amid allegations that he plagiarized texts and lied about his educational background.(AP Photo/Francois Mori, File)

PARIS (AP) ? France's top rabbi is taking leave from his post after he acknowledged "borrowing" other people's work and lying about his education, a top Jewish leader said Thursday.

Rabbi Gilles Bernheim asked for leave at an urgent meeting in Paris of leaders of the Central Consistory of France, which accepted the request, said Richard Prasquier, the president of France's largest umbrella group of Jewish organizations.

Prasquier, speaking by mobile phone, said two other rabbis would temporarily fill the post of Grand Rabbi of France, which Bernheim will leave for at least six months. Talks about whether he might return at all will take place in the coming months, he said.

He said many people in France's 500,000-strong Jewish community have been shaken over the case.

Bernheim faced accusations by a French academic who tracks suspected plagiarism that parts of his 2011 book "Forty Jewish Meditations" and part of a text he wrote about gay marriage, same-sex parenting and adoption were lifted from others. That text, written last fall, was cited in the Christmas address of Pope Benedict XVI last year.

Asked about the claims on Tuesday, Bernheim confirmed having carried out "borrowings ... what others might call plagiarism" from others. "Not only do I deeply regret it, but I recognize it as a moral flaw," he said of one instance.

Bernheim had also come under scrutiny for claiming nearly four decades ago to have received an "aggregation" ? or high-level certification ? in philosophy. On Radio Shalom, he acknowledged he did not actually have one, but had made the claim 37 years ago during an unspecified "tragic event."

France is home to the largest Jewish community in Western Europe. The Consistory brings together nearly 500 synagogues and oratories in France and its overseas territories. Bernheim has been in the post since 2009. It normally has a seven-year term.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-04-11-France-Rabbi's%20Scandal/id-0f476d81bc2b4d55800f9753a944aca7

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Like A CarWoo For Used Cars, AutoRef Raises $850K Seed Round ...

Pittsburgh-based startup AutoRef.com, which is something like a CarWoo for used vehicles, has raised $850,000 in seed funding. The round was led by an interesting, strategic investor: the large European online car marketplace, AutoScout24, which is owned by?Deutsche Telekom.

T-Venture, the venture arm of?Deutsche Telekom, also participated in the round alongside Innovation Works, plus local angels and other investors.

AutoRef.com was founded in December 2010, but didn?t really have a product until its participation in Pittsburgh?s AlphaLab accelerator, home to companies like?Mark Cuban and Floodgate-backed Insurance Zebra, college search startup?CollegeZen, hiring platform The Resumator, and many others.

Launched in July 2012, AutoRef has now expanded to 5,200 dealerships across the U.S., largely in the northeast, and in New Jersey in particular.

CEO Michael Pena, whose background is in equity trading, says he came up with the idea while working at the trading desk. ?I always thought that an option platform ? similar to trading or bond trading ? would make a lot of sense in the car space,? he explains. Pena also grew up in the car industry, as his family owns a dealership Vegas where he had spent summers working when younger.

Pena thought it would be great to use the ?reverse auction? format with cars ? meaning, putting customers at the center, then allowing dealerships to bid for them. That?s the same idea that the car-buying service?CarWoo?uses today, but Pena was especially interested in employing the model for used vehicles.

?New cars are easy. You get three new cars, zero mileage, and you control all the variables ? color, mileage, and year. It?s really easy to just get the lowest price,? Pena explains. ?With used cars it?s difficult there are so many variables ? maybe the mileage is off, the color is off, or it?s even a different model?how do you commoditize?that? How do you equalize that so the consumer gets the best deal??

AutoRef came up with a model where the consumer chooses a car they?re interested in, and the site then provides them with similar?vehicles based on their research history. The customer then picks three cars from that list, and that information is sent off to dealers who compete for that customer.

Despite how it sounds, the service is not just a lead gen operation.?Traditional sites bombard consumers with phone calls or emails after they provide their contact information. ?It annoys the heck out of customers and it makes it so that most customers don?t even want to go through the process,? Pena says.

AutoRef works differently. It uses technology to provide customers with a ?proxy? email and phone number, so dealers don?t have access to this personal information. And the buyer gets to say when the dealer is allowed to call or email. These virtual means of contact only work for up to 72 hours, and the customer can shut off access at any time.

For those unfamiliar with what a proxy number is, you can think of it as something like Google Voice, for example ? a virtual line that can be configured to ring your phone. And a proxy email is essentially a temporary, disposable email address which forwards to your inbox. Again, both of these work only for 72 hours, providing the customer with a bit of protection.

An interesting data point about AutoRef.com, is that while the idea is to negotiate the car buying online, when customers actually show up for their test drive, over half of them end up buying a different vehicle than the one they were researching. Pena is careful to explain that it?s not a bait-and-switch situation ? that is, it?s not that the dealer is saying their car is unavailable ? it?s the customer who?s looking around and sees something else they like better once they?re on site. But what got the customer in the door was the relationship and rapport they developed initially, having used the service to make that initial contact with the salesperson.

It?s still early days for AutoRef, which claims to see around 20,000 uniques per month, 2 percent of which convert. Of those conversions, around 38 percent end up buying a car, which averages the startup around $250 per car sold. Revenue-wise, AutoRef is making around $19,000-$20,000 per month ? but revenue isn?t why AutoScout24 made this deal.

The European company has been looking for a entry point in the U.S. market, Pena says. ?They loved the business model, and how we?re doing things differently ? how we?re charging for things on a transactional basis, how we?re scaling, and how we?re growing,? he explains. (AutoRef is growing uniques at 20 percent per week). ?You don?t see these large convertible debt rounds happen quite often?and we?re actually already in talks about putting an A round together,? he says.

There?s also the potential for a revenue model based on the analytics AutoRef is now collecting, though it will need to grow larger for those figures to be reliable.

In the meantime, AutoRef is focusing on growing its U.S. footprint, and scaling the business. With the funding, it will hire a few more sales people and engineers. However, because of AutoScout24?s involvement, the startup now has access to AutoScout?s developers in Germany for assistance on projects going forward.

Interested used car buyers can try out the site here?for free.

AutoRef simplifies car buying by providing information and reviews to consumers, then having dealerships bid for their business.

? Learn more

CarWoo! is an online new-car buying service and marketplace. Buyers come to CarWoo!, state which car they are looking for and CarWoo!?s network of over 10,000 dealers compete to sell the buyer the car. Technically the product is a semi-anonymous (first name, last initial, zip code) engagement tool. The buyer?s personal contact information (address, phone number, email) are kept private until the buyer accepts an offer from the dealer they want to buy the car from....

? Learn more

T-Venture is the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom, an integrated telecommunications company with roughly 180MM customers and more than $75m net revenue in 2011 ? more than half of that from international operations. T-Venture was founded in 1997 to advise and look after young, innovative enterprises which show potential economical and technological synergies with the business units of Deutsche Telekom. T-Venture has two evergreen funds: Products & Services Fund, Process & Infrastructure Fund. The headquarters are in Bonn...

? Learn more

Autoscout24 is a European online car-marketplace, that operates in 18 European countries.

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Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/like-a-carwoo-for-used-cars-autoref-raises-850k-seed-round-led-by-european-car-buying-marketplace-autoscout24/

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Post Office takes on banks with current accounts

By Matt Scuffham

LONDON (Reuters) - The Post Office will provide a new competitor to Britain's established but unpopular high street banks, offering current accounts to customers at its 11,500 branches across the UK from this spring.

The government-owned Post Office said its move to add current accounts - the top prize for British banks looking to broaden sales to customers - to its existing range of money products would turn it into one of Britain's biggest financial services providers.

It already offers savings accounts, insurance and foreign currency exchange to around 3 million customers and has savings deposits worth about 17 billion pounds.

Britain's biggest five banks - Lloyds, Barclays, RBS, HSBC and Santander UK - control 83 percent of retail accounts and MPs and regulators are keen for competitors to emerge.

The 'Big 5' have been plagued by scandals, ranging from the mis-selling of insurance products and complex hedging products to the fixing of benchmark interest rates, eroding public confidence in the industry.

"Customers want simplicity, transparency and good value for money. We can provide this through the most convenient and accessible retail network in the UK," Nick Kennett, Director of Financial Services at the Post Office, said in a statement on Thursday.

Consumer group Which? said it welcomed the emergence of challengers that will "increase consumer choice and tackle the unhealthy dominance of the biggest banks". But other observers doubt the Post Office will be able to make serious inroads into the market.

"It is hard to see how the Post Office is going to differentiate itself," said Peter Hahn, who teaches finance at London's Cass Business School.

Metro Bank became the first new high street lender to have emerged in the UK for over 100 years when it opened in 2011.

Britons have traditionally been reluctant to switch accounts because of the perceived aggravation involved in doing so. However, that could change in September when new measures are introduced handing banks a seven-day deadline to switch a customer's account over to a rival.

British banks compete intensely for current accounts as it gives them a base from which to cross sell other products such as mortgages and loans.

The Post Office, which became independent of the Royal Mail last April and will remain in state hands after the Royal Mail's planned privatisation, said it would initially launch its current account service in a small number of branches before a wider roll-out in 2014.

It will look to pick up new customers through banks closing branches to cut costs.

According to the Campaign for Community Banking, a lobby group, 900 towns and villages in Britain only have one bank branch left while 1,200 communities have no bank at all.

The Post Office itself has been criticised for closing branches and replacing them with branches within shops. However, it has said the overall size of its network will not be cut.

Other retailers are also expanding into banking, looking to utilise their branch networks. Marks & Spencer is opening branches within its stores, in partnership with HSBC, while Tesco is also set to launch current account services.

(Reporting by Matt Scuffham; Editing by Clelia Oziel)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/post-office-takes-banks-current-accounts-132104483--sector.html

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Balloon Juice ? Blog Archive ? Mothers against drunk testing

By Kay April 10th, 2013

Great little insider-y piece from Texas on the pushback to the school reform industry:

If there?s one person in America who?s responsible for your child stressing about filling in the right little ovals with a No. 2 pencil, it?s Sandy Kress, the ?key architect of No Child Left Behind? who later became a lobbyist for Pearson, the testing company. As high-stakes testing faces a national backlash, lawmakers in Texas?the birthplace of high-stakes standardized testing?aren?t just dialing back the state?s emphasis on tests but are also turning their guns on Kress to limit his policy-making role.
Opposition to high-stakes testing is popping up nationwide. In Seattle, teachers protested what they saw as the inequity of the Washington state test by refusing to administer it, sparking a copycat strike at dozens of high schools in nearby Portland. In Providence, 50 high school students outraged that their diplomas required them to pass standardized tests, dressed up like zombies and marched through the downtown rush hour chanting ?No education, no life.? Even Bill Gates, long a proponent of education accountability, recently penned a Washington Post op-ed opposing the use of test scores to evaluate teachers.
But nowhere is the movement against high-stakes testing as strong as it is in Texas where all this started. Now, 86% of the state?s school boards have adopted resolutions opposing the over-reliance on high-stakes testing. Rick Perry?s last education commissioner called testing a ?perversion of what is intended.? Volunteer moms, angry that a new testing regime forced their children to pass 15 standardized tests to get out of high school, lobbied the legislature with such vehemence that politicians began calling them ?Mothers Against Drunk Testing.? The defenders of the testing status quo are now down to two: Kress, and Bill Hammond, a top business lobbyist who heads an organization that Pearson is a member of.
Kress advised Bush as governor, and when Bush became president, Kress?as a former Democratic Party official in Dallas?lobbied Ted Kennedy to support NCLB. He enjoyed a smooth transition into lobbying and has enjoyed an insider role in Perry?s administration,serving on state advisory boards and commissions that invariably found that the way to improve schools was more testing. It never caused a stir when Kress would testify before the legislature as a member of the state advisory panels in favor of more testing, leaving his status as a lobbyist for the testing company unstated. Now there?s a growing sense that testing has gotten out of control.
The backlash has now reached the chamber where this all started. When the Texas House passed a testing relief bill, lawmakers included two amendments aimed at Kress. Texas lawmakers, who have never exactly held business lobbyists at arm?s length, have had enough of Kress pretending he doesn?t have a conflict of interest while advocating unpopular policies that enrich his client. One amendment would ban testing lobbyists from serving on state education advisory boards, cutting to the heart of Kress? ability to lobby from the inside. Another amendment would make it a misdemeanor for a testing lobbyist to make political contributions. When politicians make it a crime to give them money, something?s up.
Only congress can repeal No Child Left Behind, but Bush passed it by selling the notion that the tests worked in Texas when he was governor. Texas no longer believes in its own miracle, and the architect of this mess has lost his influence. Nobody?s buying what Sandy Kress is selling anymore.

I have a theory on why the school reform industry can?t quit pushing standardized testing. If your business plan includes the expansion of national chain charters and a lot of employee turn-over and federally-subsidied temp agencies and constant ?cage-busting? churn, there?s no other way to evaluate a student, teacher or school than with a number. They don?t want parents to measure a school on anything other than a number because they?re not offering anything other than a number.

Everyone talks about the Atlanta scandal in terms of the cheaters, but I read the prosecutor?s report and I immediately imagined working in that environment or going to school there. No one trusted anyone else. It must have been a nightmare as a workplace, let alone as a school. The school reform industry is focusing on the cheaters, the few bad apples defense, but what was it like working or going to school there if one didn?t cheat? If people are wearing a god dammed wire at your workplace or school, ?excellence? probably isn?t happening there, no matter the test scores.

This is a successful public school that has good numbers. They also have a team of people who work well together and have worked well together a long time. This school is as knitted-into the fabric of the town as a public instiution could possibly be. They have long and deep relationships both inside the school and in the larger community. They don?t spend tens of millions on advertising like the charter chains because they?re a truly public school, but if they did advertise they would have much, much more to sell to parents than a kid?s test scores going up or down.

The school reform industry focuses exclusively on test scores because that?s all they have. They aren?t selling local control and input or public schools as the backbone of a democratic society or a great school culture or long-term working relationships between teachers and among students and families and the rest of the people in a community.They can?t. It won?t work with their national chain privatization business model.

h/t

Source: http://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/04/10/mothers-against-drunk-testing/

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FBI investigating recording of McConnell talks

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) ? Campaign aides to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell proposed using actress Ashley Judd's past bouts with depression against her if she had decided to challenge him in his re-election bid next year, according to a secret recording posted by a magazine.

Mother Jones released a recording Tuesday along with an article about a private meeting in which the aides discussed opposition research into potential Democratic challengers. Aides talked and laughed on the recording about Judd's political positions, religious beliefs and past bouts of depression.

The FBI is looking into how the recording was made after the McConnell campaign accused opponents of engaging in "Watergate-era tactics." The magazine reported that the recording was provided last week by a source who requested anonymity.

"She's clearly ? this sounds extreme ? but she is emotionally unbalanced," a McConnell aide said of Judd during a February meeting at the Louisville campaign headquarters. "I mean it's been documented ... she's suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the '90s."

Judd has been open about her bouts with depression. She spoke to the American Counseling Association's national convention in Cincinnati in March, telling more than 3,000 counselors from across the country about her experiences. Her spokeswoman, Cara Tripicchio, criticized the McConnell campaign for considering making it a campaign issue.

"This is yet another example of the politics of personal destruction that embody Mitch McConnell and are pervasive in Washington DC," Tripicchio said in a statement. "We expected nothing less from Mitch McConnell and his camp than to take a personal struggle such as depression, which many Americans cope with on a daily basis, and turn it into a laughing matter."

McConnell was asked several times at a news conference Tuesday about the propriety of attacking Judd over depression. He did not directly answer, but repeatedly brought up an incident last month, when Progress Kentucky tweeted an insensitive remark about his wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

"As you know, my wife's ethnicity was attacked by a left-wing group in Kentucky and apparently they also bugged my headquarters," he said. "So I think that pretty well sums up the way the political left is operating in Kentucky."

The FBI confirmed that it was contacted by McConnell's office and was looking into the matter. The magazine didn't return a call seeking comment.

McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton alleged in an email to supporters that "liberals and their media allies" were "wire-tapping our field office to spy on us," even though it wasn't clear how the recording was obtained. Benton used the issue as a fundraising appeal, asking supporters to send donations "to help us spread the truth."

On the recording posted on Mother Jones' website, McConnell began the meeting by telling aides the campaign had entered "the Whac-A-Mole period" and explained that means "when anybody sticks their head up, do them out."

The magazine reported the aides huddled on Feb. 2 in a private meeting to discuss potential Democratic opponents, including Judd and Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes. Grimes, a rising star within the Kentucky Democratic Party, hasn't ruled herself out as a challenger.

An unidentified aide said Judd had made a public statement as a Tennessee delegate to the Democratic national convention about her support of President Barack Obama, an unpopular figure in Kentucky. The aide said that statement could be used against her and raised another issue: Judd lives in Tennessee, not Kentucky.

In another instance, the aide played a recording of Judd talking about her evolving religious beliefs, which included native faith practices. The aides laugh loudly. An unidentified man then says "the people at Southeast Christian would take to the streets with pitchforks," referring to an evangelical megachurch in Louisville.

The magazine was the first to report about Republican Mitt Romney's comments to donors paying $50,000 apiece to attend a private reception that 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government, see themselves as victims and believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.

Romney's critics used the video to argue that he was out of touch with average Americans during the last presidential campaign.

Kentucky Democratic Party Chairman Dan Logsdon said the recording is telling about McConnell.

"I certainly do not know anything about how this may have happened," Logsdon said. "However, it's clear that this is the McConnell we all know: leading a negative, nasty campaign determined to lash out at his opponents since he doesn't have any accomplishments to point to."

___

Associated Press writers Jim Abrams and Donna Cassata in Washington and Brett Barrouquere in Louisville contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fbi-investigating-recording-mcconnell-talks-190453229--election.html

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Google steps up efforts to purge bad apps from Google Play

By Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is capable of intercepting a North Korean missile, should it launch one in the coming days, but may choose not to if the projected trajectory shows it is not a threat, a top U.S. military commander told Congress on Tuesday. Admiral Samuel Locklear, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific region, said the U.S. military believed North Korea had moved to its east coast an unspecified number of Musudan missiles, with a range of roughly 3,000-3,500 miles. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/google-steps-efforts-purge-bad-apps-google-play-172046316.html

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